ART CITIES:N.York-Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke worked with a variety of media: paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, objects, installations, and films. Characterized by a relentlessly experimental and inquisitive attitude, the artist’s work employs unusual materials and techniques, and playfully defies social, political, and aesthetic conventions. Throughout his career, Sigmar’s Polke unorthodox approach to materials, subject matter, and artistic processes was always concerned with the testing of limits and boundaries.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Zwirner Gallery Archive
Sigmar’s Polke works in the exhibition “Eine Winterreise” at David Zwirner Gallery in New York range from the ‘60s to the ‘80s offering a complex reinterpretations of travel-related themes. The exhibition centers on the artist’s around-the-world journey from 1980 to 1981 that took him to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, Malaysia, and Thailand, among other locations. As noted by Polke, this trip inspired a close consideration of the material forms and cultural practices of color itself: “How, for example, Hinduism explains and uses color or how Australians use color”. The exploration of color led Sigmar Polke to the unconventional use of often dangerous or unstable chemical substances within his work. Describing this process, Polke stated simply: “I was looking for brilliance of color, and it happened to be toxic”. The exhibition includes a number of large-scale paintings, including “Magnetische Landschaft”, an abstract mountainscape executed in acrylic and iron mica on store-bought, checked fabric from 1982. The materials, content, and support in this work each simultaneously present distinct facets of Polke’s multivalent investigation into German cultural and artistic history: medieval alchemical and (pseudo-)scientific experiments, Romanticism’s fraught invocation of the natural world, and postwar Germany’s bourgeois embrace of consumerism. The link between material experimentation and physical exploration is further explored in Polke’s “Lappländische Reis” (1984). As the series progresses, recognizable figures are eliminated, as semi-transparent washes of lacquer dissolve into shifting, hallucinogenic forms. Polke’s attention to the properties and effects of transparency can be seen also in the selection of works from his series “Laterna Magica”. Painted in lacquer on both sides of transparent polyester fabric, they combine figuration and abstraction in complex, layered compositions. Also on view is a selection of experimental film works that document Polke’s own travels.
Info: Curator: Vicente Todolí, David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 7/5-25/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
